Category Archives: St. Anthony’s Stories

Mark let his arm drop to his side. He could hear the squawk “Sir? Sir!” Her tone suggested a reprimand for his requests for assistance. He pressed the red circle on the screen and she fell silent. Just then his bus drove down the street without stopping, splashing dirty brown slush across Mark’s trousers and coat.

He began to walk without a destination in mind, dragging his feet as though he were dragging concrete blocks behind him. He gasped for breath and wished for a moment that he had been standing in front of the bus. It would be easier, maybe, than getting back on the phone with the Veterans Administration or any of the other offices they kept suggesting he call to remedy the error in the system. It would be easier than all these calls for one pill, just one to help ease his pain.

He began moving faster and then, without warning, his feet were suddenly lighter than air, flying in front of him as he hit an icy patch beneath the fresh fallen snow. The sound was sucked right out of his chest, prohibiting him from bellowing an expletive at the top of his lungs.

Mark lay on the sidewalk, his hat rolling into the street and quivered. He stared up at the lacy branches interlocking across the steely sky above him. A large, swiftly falling flake landed directly on his eye and he closed them, fast. There was a warm wetness at the corner of his eye that traced a meandering path down his face and into his left ear. Then, what was this? Another. And another.

Mark let his shoulders sink away from his ears and his feet droop to the sides as he let his body conform to the soft snow beneath him. His chest began to lighten and the sound returned.

They sat on the driveway in their lawn chairs chasing the shade. By late afternoon, the entire concrete pad would be bathed in white hot July sunlight and they’d be forced to retreat to the shade of the garage or inside entirely, but for now, the moved their chairs every twenty minutes or so as the shadow of the oak tree crept across the lawn. Laura was cradling a mystery novel from the library in her lap and the edges made a sweaty crease across her thighs. Adam absently poked at his phone from time to time and the dog, Fred, lay on her side and panted miserably.

Laura knew she would lose this battle. The couple of hundred bucks they’d make on their junk would not convince Adam that the whole ordeal was worth it. After weeks of stockpiling old clothes and unused kitchen appliances and hand-me-down tools in the garage, hours of pricing and tagging, and now this, the hottest day of the year. If the woman hadn’t knocked on their door an hour before they were ready to open for business, perhaps she could have managed a truce. That violation of Adam’s privacy, however, had pushed the whole charade from “tolerable” to “absolutely not fucking worth it.”

Ted and Bea rounded the corner and inched up the street in Ted’s little Ford Ranger. Laura pressed her lips together. She was pretty sure Bea had a car, she glimpsed an older model Buick in the garage, behind the door that was always shut. But Ted insisted on driving her everywhere, escorting her to and from the market and the bank like an antiquated chauffer. Bea bounded out of the passenger seat dressed in white and pink, her tan legs still shapely. She carried a tennis racket and wiggled her fingers in their general direction by way of greeting. Ted was still swinging his legs out the door and, with great effort, was pulling himself out of the truck with one arm gripping the door handle and the other precariously placed atop his cane. Bea steadied him by the elbow and helped him to his place on the glider in their side yard. When he was appropriately settled she bounded up the stairs and into the kitchen door. Laura could see her cracking ice into glasses.

“She takes awfully good care of him, the old grump,” Laura said.

“He’s not so bad.” She got the distinct impression that any idea she had at this juncture would provoke disagreement in her husband and so she shrugged, leaned back and closed her eyes, pointed refusing to engage.

He wasn’t so bad, though, that was true. When they’d first moved into the house a year ago, Ted—slightly more nimble then—had hobbled up the driveway and offered Adam the use of any of his tools. “Anything atall,” he’d said, making the last two words into one, like her grandfather. Laura suspected he had more interest in seeing what Adam was working on in the garage—he’d been building her a bench. Ted made a few pointed suggestions, Adam graciously thanked him and then he’d returned to his glider.

Nosy old man, Laura thought.

She must have drifted off there on the driveway, because what seemed like moments later she was blinking her eyes open, aware of the tell tale tingle on her nose and shoulders. The shade had moved and she had not moved with it. She looked around for Adam, how could he let her fall asleep in the midday sun like that? A shadow fell across her lap.

“I’d like this here garden hose. How much?”

“Hi, there, Ted.” Laura squinted up at him, his face dark and backlit by the sun directly behind him. “Adam priced it at $3.”

“I’ll give you two.” He held out his hand and impatiently shook a pile of quarters at her as if the decision had been made. Laura gritted her teeth and took them.

“She had Alzheimer’s, you know.” Ted stood awkwardly. Laura still couldn’t make out his face and tried to shift to see him better. “We’re going to have to leave this house. I’ve done my best for so long, but I—“

“Oh, Ted, I’m sorry.”

“I just can’t bear putting her in a home, but I.” To her horror, his voice caught. “I can’t do it anymore. I want to. But I can’t.”

He let out a noise that Laura was sure was more animal than human, a sort of wail and groan and snort. He put his free hand over his eyes, the green garden hose dangling from his wrist. Laura tried to stand, but before she could, Adam was there at Ted’s side. He put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed for a moment. Laura marveled at how tall he was there, next to this old man who seemed to shrink by the minute. Her young, lithe husband, so boy-like, seemed to know just what to do.

“Thank you for telling us, Ted. We’ll do whatever we can to help.” Adam said.

“I just didn’t want you to think she was crazy if she started talking about her babies. Her babies are older than you all. You might find it peculiar—“

“Well, we’ll be happy to listen either way.” Adam said, taking the hose from Ted’s arm. Ted fixed his eyes on him over the tops of his glasses.

“Yes, well, that’s kind of you. Would you mind helping me home, now?”

Laura, unable to breathe or swallow, watched the two of them amble tentatively across the yard to where Bea stood, holding two glasses of lemonade, beaming.

“Toronto is the best city I’ve ever been too.” Sherri pushed her hair back from her face and continued to buff her long, curved fingernails, neglecting to mention how many cities she’d actually visited. Molly knew she’d only been to St. Louis and Chicago. “Blake goes there for his work meetings, conferences, whatever, every year. He always takes me with him and I go shopping while he works. It’s the best place to shop. Better than Chicago.”

“Where’s Toronto?” Brandi asked, twirling a lock of permed hair around her finger.

“Don’t do that, you’ll make the curl fall out.” Sherri said, lifting her eyes from her fingernails. Brandi put her hands in her lap. “It’s in Canada.” She said the word as though she were saying Borneo. Molly had been to Canada, once, to Niagara Falls with her family. She never talked about the vacations she and her family took every summer, even though everyone in the room knew, they all lived on the same block after all. She knew if she spoke of her trips it would be gloating, and she didn’t want to gloat. Besides, Sherri’s trips to Toronto and all the things she and Blake did together were far more interesting than some national park.

Sherri sat on the cream colored couch in the Strickland’s small living room, while Brandi and Molly sprawled on the floor. The room felt smaller with the weight of the frames adorning the buff colored walls, pictures of Sherri and Blake in their wedding garb, Sherri and Blake and their families on their wedding day, and Sherri and Blake with eighteen attendants between them. Molly admired how the bridesmaids and groomsmen all lined the concrete steps in front of the church according to height, forming a perfect pyramid. She wondered if that was by design, or if Sherri and Blake were just lucky enough to like their friends in direct proportion to their height. She was pretty sure it was the latter.

“Molly, you’ve been working on the same math problem for fifteen minutes,” Sherri observed. “Do you need help?” Molly didn’t. What she wanted was to put aside her math and give her undivided attention to Sherri’s tales of buying a two piece and shopping for strappy sandals like Brandi who rarely brought her homework to Sherri and Blake’s. Molly wanted to be the first to hold Baby Kirk when he woke up from his nap and she wanted to hear Sherri laugh at one of her jokes. Besides, she didn’t need help with her math, though sometime she let Sherri help because she seemed to enjoy it.

“Did you hear that Melissa got her—“ Brandi stopped and smiled sheepishly, then whispered, “her period?” Molly felt a sinking feeling in her stomach. She loved to hear Sherri talk about growing up as one of ten girls. She loved the stories of her wedding day, the shenanigans the guys caused by being late after a night out drinking, the girls that gave her special trinkets at breakfast and dancing to The Time of My Life for their first dance. She loved that Sherri trusted her to retrieve Baby Kirk from his crib after his nap, change his diaper and warm a bottle and then carry him around the house balanced on her own twelve year old hip as though he were hers. But she did not want to talk about periods. Periods led to talking about boobs and boobs led to talking about boys and, well, Molly didn’t even want to think about boys and boobs and periods in the same paragraph, much less the same sentence.

Everyone else seemed to love to talk them, though. Brandi was dying to know everything there was to know about all of the above. Sherri had plenty of advice to share. You didn’t swim with your period, nor did you wear white pants. You probably shouldn’t do anything in gym class, either. Bras were very important, you should start wearing one as SOON as you had a ghost of a tit, or your nipples would crawl toward your toes before you were thirty. Bras and panties should match, except during your period, at which time you should just wear granny panties no matter what so as not to ruin your nice ones. Once they talked about trimming your hair down there, but Molly said she needed to go to the bathroom and stayed there until she was sure the conversation had shifted.

As far as Molly could tell, when you got your period, your life was over for the next forty years of your life until something called menopause happened, which meant that you were old and even more miserable. And when it was your time of the month, if you could just hibernate in your bedroom that would be best for everyone.

“Tell me more about Toronto,” Molly said quickly.

“We stayed in this hotel and it had this giant chandelier in the lobby. Oh. My. God. It was bangin’.” Sherri stopped and looked over her shoulder out the window at the car that pulled up in the driveway. “Kinda early for Blake to be home.”

Molly ran to the refrigerator and pulled a can of Miller Lite off the bottom shelf. She was ready—this was the running gag she and Blake had. She stood in the doorway between the kitchen and living room and waited for him to notice her.

“You’re home early,” Sherri said.

“Yeah.” He ran his hand through his hair and glanced around the room at Brandi painting her toenails on the living room carpet, Sherri reading a magazine and finally, Molly standing in the door with his can of beer. He sighed and held out his hand. She grinned and pretended to shake the can. She wasn’t really, she was shaking her body more than the can, and besides, Blake was good at drinking the foam. This time he snatched the can from her hands and turned on Sherri.

“Why is it that every goddamn day I come home and there is a gaggle of kids hanging out in my living room?”

“Because I like them,” Sherri said, staring at her fingernails.

“They don’t belong here! They are not my kids, they are not your sisters, they are just neighborhood kids! I just want to come home and sit on my couch with a beer in peace.”

Sherri looked at Brandi, her face apologetic. Brandi shrugged in response and began to collect her cotton balls and nail polish remover. Sherri turned to Molly, but she’d already backed through the kitchen.

“It’s ok, Molly,” Sherri called, but Molly had slipped through the kitchen door and began to weave her way back through the yards, up the block to her own backyard. She’d left her math homework on Sherri and Blake’s living room rug, she’d have to go back to get it and she couldn’t bear the thought of returning.

The next morning he heard Blake’s voice talking to her father. She hid at the top of the stairs, breathlessly waiting for Blake to leave. She was sure he was telling her father she was never allowed to return, that she took up too much of his wife’s time and energy

“Molly.” Her father stood on the landing and held out her math book, papers sticking out of the binding. “Keep better track of your things. You’re almost a teenager. Act your age.”

I always walk to my yoga class so Ben won’t wonder why I’m so rosy and cold when I get home. It’s a half-mile walk, straight shot, really, just ten minutes or so. Every Thursday I think about it all day long, I watch the minutes tick by, closer and closer to six o’clock and I begin to feel my heart race. Every week I think maybe I’ll be sick or tired and I won’t go. And every week I go anyway.

As I get closer to the big glass doors on the first floor of the fancy new condo building that just went up 18 month ago, I feel my pace slow. And as I’m approaching I can see the teacher through the windows, welcoming two rows of students in brightly colored tanks and pants. I think, I can’t walk in now, late. I’ll disrupt the whole class and what’s worse than disrupting a yoga class?

A couple of times someone ballsier than me has ducked breathlessly into class, trying to inauspiciously unroll her mat in a cramped back corner of the room while breathing deeply and trying to find her center.

Sometimes I watch the class for a while. I remember the poses for later. But mostly I just watch the students and how they react to the movements. Some are proud and limber, others clearly more in tune with their breath, some fold forward and their arms dangle many inches above the tops of their feet. Once I saw a man cry as he brought his hands to his heart.

More often, though, I walk through the neighborhood, carrying my yoga mat with me. I walk the dark streets with no destination or intention. I watch people coming home from work, struggling with groceries up the icy front steps, ungloved hands blistering red in the cold. I watch the dog walkers, talking on the phone or listening to music, cocking a hip to the side while their companions do their business. There is an old man that walks deliberately from his apartment in a residential living facility to the corner bar at six-thirty on the dot. Sometimes I follow him, afraid he’ll slip on the ice or trip over a crack in the sidewalk. He never has.

When I walk up the steps to our house, it is always at the same time, 7:25. Ben looks up from his computer and tells me that the baby is sleeping.

I’ve been behind on the St. Anthony’s stories–forgive me. I’m working on a monster one to make up for it. In the meantime, here’s something I wrote as part of my novel…it likely won’t make the cut, but I kinda like it anyway. ~ Sarah

Look. There isn’t much to say about me. I can’t think of one single thing that makes me stand out. I prefer the Republican to the Democrat, the Cardinals to the Royals and meat to vegetables. I go hunting but don’t particularly enjoy it, I tell people I can bench press 250 but that’s a lie, but everybody lies about that, so. I don’t have a girlfriend, but I have had my fair share. My parents are still married and they seem to like each other well enough. I grew up pretty ordinary.

We went to church every Sunday, more out of habit than anything. Like a lot of folks around, it was more a place to say hello to all your neighbors than to get real intimate with the Lord. Most of the time when I sat in those pews and put my forehead to my folded hands I was trying to stay awake. I’d look over and see my dad doing the same thing. I can’t think of many times I had a real conversation with God sitting in St. James or any other place for that matter. We went to nine o’clock service and then to the coffee and doughnut reception afterward in the basement. Then we’d go home and my mother would make a big Sunday supper. Sunday afternoon is when people went for drives and if you lived in the country like we did, you’d expect visitors. It’s one of the only times people from town came out to the country roads. I don’t know why, I expect it has something to do with having more time and everything else being closed. If you drove through downtown Burton on a Sunday afternoon, you wouldn’t see many cars and the supermarkets were near empty. I remember Sundays being the sacred day not because we were supposed to be thinking of God all day, like some folks suggested, but because it was the day you spent with your family. I spent a lot of time gallivanting all over the county, but on Sunday I didn’t even pick up the phone.

Everybody knows the Schusters, we’ve been around for quite some time and there are a lot of us. My dad was one of fourteen, and his dad was one of eleven. We often joke that we could swing an election in Walnut County if every last one of us voted. Being named Schuster in Walnut County didn’t necessarily get you anything special, but everyone sure knew who you were.

At holidays we used have to rent out the Elk’s Lodge because nobody’s house was big enough for all of us. After my Uncle Ray built that big fancy heated barn, we started having holiday suppers in there. You think that’s funny, probably, but you have no idea how nice this barn was. Up above there was an office and a kitchen, a pool table and a bar with a sixty-inch television on the wall and a couple of leather couches. The cattle were down below. Every now and again you’d hear them bellow, but mostly you’d just think you were in someone’s house. My dad frowned at that barn and one time when my sister pressed him he said it was ostentatious, but Uncle Ray had enough money so it was none of our business.

When I graduated from high school I did two years of community college and then went to the police academy. I wasn’t the smartest of the bunch, but I had a good head on my shoulders. I couldn’t stomach the idea of looking at a computer all day. I didn’t think I was going to be a big detective or anything like that, I don’t even think Walnut County has one of them. But I did think that when there was some kind of domestic disturbance, I could probably de-escalate it pretty well. Or if there was a robbery, I could get as much information as quickly and calmly as possible and, you know, get it taken care of. Some people raise the temperature in the room. That’s not me.

Carrie called 911 on November 7th. It was a Wednesday, I believe. Far enough after Halloween that there wasn’t much going on. Everybody had gotten the mischief out of their systems. It had been drizzly and chilly all week, that lazy sort of weather that makes you think the sky just couldn’t get up the gumption to commit to something. It’s the kind of weather that drives people in doors. The call came in at 8:47 PM, Nancy the dispatcher told me later. She was rattled. Her hand shook like a drunk’s while she held on to that Styrofoam cup of decaf coffee. She said that Carrie sounded like she were calling in a broken streetlight or a kid playing his music too loud, her voice was so matter of fact. She just said that her father had been shot.

I was the first to respond. I think now that I probably did have some kind of conversation with the Lord, though I didn’t know what I was doing at the time. I do know that I was damn grateful that it was me that pulled into that long driveway first. I was grateful that Flip’s truck was nowhere to be seen.

Flip was my first friend. He’s not always the greatest friend, nor is he the greatest husband. He’s the kind of guy that raises the temperature in a room just by walking into it. Sometimes that’s pretty great, and you just want to be around him because you figure some of the fun will rub off. Other times it turns sour. A lot of people don’t like that sour aftertaste and they fade away. I figure that if I’m going to leech off the good times, the least I can do is be around for the ugly.

Tuesday was poker night at the Palace Pub, so I knew just where he’d be: leaning back in his chair with his back against the wall so he could see everything in the room, smoking a cigarette and gloating. Everybody suspected he cheated and it was almost as competitive to keep him from doing so as it was to just win the damn game. One thing about Flip, he’d liven up the party. I worked Tuesday nights and usually picked him up and drove him home just to keep him from getting behind the wheel. Sometimes we’d go to the truck stop and drink coffee and eat breakfast. I tried to keep him occupied, get him sobered up. He and Carrie fight on nights like that. She asked me once why I stuck by him knowing he’d never change. I didn’t have an answer for her, but I suspect now that it’s because I think he tries to be a good man, just like he tried to be a good boy. He just has trouble committing to it.

When we were little bity kids, maybe ten or so, I was at Flip’s house in town. His parents ran the grocery store in Burton, the one Flip runs now, and they weren’t ever home. Flip was left with his big sister Tasha, which meant we could do whatever we pleased. That day we took off on our bicycles to the store, shoved Hershey bars and orange sodas down our pants and then made our way to the city park. It was early summer so the air hadn’t gotten that wet-blanket feel just yet, and the park was all but deserted. Later in the day when the baseball games started and the concession stand opened the whole place would be a zoo but in those morning hours we had it to ourselves.

The swings and slides weren’t as interesting to us as rest of the deserted park. We’d go to the pay phone, dial zero and make prank calls to the operator. We tried to find a way into the groundskeeper’s cottage, reasoning that there’d be all sorts of good tools in there. There was a fence around the wading pool, which didn’t open until early afternoon and we did our best to scale it without getting caught.

That day we wheeled our bikes across the baseball diamond and through a gap in the fence to where the concession stand straddled the two fields. It was a big stand with food on the first level and the announcers stand up above. We love our baseball in Burton and boys like us dreamt about the day we’d be big enough to play on that field with the Mr. Andrews calling the game over the loudspeaker. On either side of the concession stand were rows of bleachers and we often scavenged for all the things people dropped the night before and plumb forgot about. That day, at the back of the bleachers stuck between two support beams, we found a roll of cash. It was a big roll, big enough that my fist couldn’t close around it and we stood there staring at it for a long time.

“Holeeeeey shit.” Flip said. We weren’t acquainted with cursing yet and it startled me, but I reasoned the occasion warranted the language. He unwound the rubber band and began to count. There was nearly five hundred dollars there, which to us might as well have been a million.

“Let’s buy a car,” I said.

“You can’t buy a car for five hundred bucks, you dummy.”

“My daddy got his Chevy for $500 and a steer.”

“There ain’t no car worth buying for $500. It probably wouldn’t even run.”

“What would you do with it, smarty?” He shrugged and looked at me sideways as if to say “wouldn’t you like to know.”

The thing was, we knew we weren’t going to be buying cars or truckloads of candy or bus tickets to Chicago. We were still young enough to be afraid of getting caught stealing this wad of bills from its rightful owner.

“What do we do?” I asked. Flip usually had an answer for everything, and at the moment he was suspiciously silent. “We can’t keep it.”

“I know that.” He glared at me. “Who do we give it to? How do we know whose it is?”

We spent the better part of an hour under the bleacher rows, guzzling orange soda and eating melted chocolate bars trying to puzzle out this problem. We could take it to the police and have them finger print it, I suggested. Flip rejected that outright. “Do you know how many finger prints are on money you moron?” I didn’t, but I took that to mean there were a lot. Flip thought that maybe we should put up a sign that said, “If you lost something here, call this number.” I thought that sounded pretty good in theory, but then what happened when somebody started calling the number? What then? The idea of returning grocery money to a little old lady sounded heroic. The idea of meeting a burly, tattooed, grizzled drug dealer on a Harley was terrifying.

“Can’t we just take it to your parents and ask them what to do?” I was tired; this game had lost its appeal. I didn’t know what the right answer was and I was bored of trying to figure it out. That’s what adults were for—to tell you what you should do. Flip shrugged. He, too, seemed to have lost interest. Now I wonder why we didn’t just leave it there for it’s careless owner to come reclaim, or let it be someone else’s problem, but at the time turning it over to adults seemed like the safest course of action.

When we walked into Flip’s parent’s store, the assistant manager straightened his red IGA smock and scowled at us. “You better go see your mother,” he said, staring down his hawk nose at us.

“What did you think we were doing, you dummy? Coming to talk to you?” Flip sneered and stalked right past him.

The office was in the front of the store, just behind the courtesy counter. Flip’s mother sat behind the large wooden desk. The room was oppressive. The walls were paneled with warped wood paneling and the sheer amount of paper stacked on file cabinets, credenzas, and even the windowsill had to be a fire hazard. Donna pulled her glasses down her nose and stared at us.

“Did you take sodas and candy without paying for them again?” She asked without even saying hello.

“Yeah, mom, but listen—“

“I told you what would happen the next time you did that.” She hadn’t moved she just kept staring over those half-glasses. Donna was pretty in an older lady kind of way. She had very tight, uniformly curled blonde hair that I think was the result of something my sister called a permanent wave and she wore very pink lipstick. She always dressed in blazers and skirts, though she rarely left the little office.

“Mom, we’re sorry but you’ve got to listen to me, Jimmy and I found something and we need your help.” Flip spoke very fast. He looked panicked. I wasn’t sure what the punishment was for stealing merchandise from your parents’ store, but clearly he did and it had caused the blood to rise in his cheeks.

“I don’t care what you found.” She stood, went to the back of the door where there was a paddle on a hook. She kept one at home, too, I’d seen it there. My parents weren’t above whacking me every now and then but I could tell that this was not going to be the same sort of whack. Flip’s voice had reached a pitch that I’d never heard and he was talking very fast, trying to explain what had happened at the park and his concerns about the wad of money before his mother could bend him over the desk and wind up with the paddle.

She completely ignored him. She just turned Flip around, gripped him at the nape of the neck and pushed his face toward her desk. His forehead lay flat on the wood and every time she wound up and landed that paddle, the top of his head shoved the folders on her desk a few millimeters forward. He kept talking as she hit him, but it was muffled both from the desk and his own tears and that just seemed to make her angrier. I’d never seen anger like that before. Her face didn’t change; her voice was as calm as it would be if she were telling you the total for your groceries. And yet you could almost see her shaking with fury. For the most part I couldn’t see her eyes, but when she glanced up to see the folders on her desk teetering near the edge, they were flat.

The rage I was used to seeing was my mother’s loud, shrieking anger. When we’d pushed the limit to far, when I’d back-talked her one too many times, her voice would rise to an octave that I could barely tolerate. It usually went away as quickly as it came on. My father’s anger was of a quieter variety, but I’d watched him punch the wall of the barn before. Donna’s anger, though, it was a well and it’s depth frightened me.

“Get out! Jimmy, get out of here! Get out. Get out. Get out!” Flip was no longer trying to explain what happened. He sounded furious at me, as though I was harming him by being there. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to save me from the same treatment or if he was ashamed. I backed slowly up and just as I turned around I heard his mother.

“You goddamn baby. You’re going to have to clean that up, too.” There at Flip’s feet was a puddle. The sight of that puddle seized my insides. I could barely breathe and the orange soda and chocolate churned in my stomach. All I could think about was getting as far away from Flip, his mother and his humiliation as I could.

I backed out of the office and ran out of the store. I’d left the roll of cash with Flip and as far as I was concerned, I never wanted to see it again. From then on I avoided Flip’s mom as much as possible. It wasn’t hard to do, really. His folks were rarely at school events or church; they were always running that store. I figure, though, that what I saw that day had a lot to do with why Flip always seemed so wildly inconsistent, why the part of him that drew people in like flies to honey was also the thing that drove them away.

That’s why on the night Carrie called 911 and reported that her dad was shot, I was more thankful than I’ve ever been that Flip was unreachable in the back of People’s Pub. He might turn up and be the most caring, sensitive husband anyone could ask for. He might take charge where Carrie couldn’t, stroke her hair when she looked as though she were going to crumble, field questions from the authorities.

But he might not.

I pulled into the driveway and the beams of my headlights caught the silver of Carrie’s step-mom Anne’s hair against the blackness of the old farmhouse’s front lawn. It was so light it looked like frost. She was lying motionless, her thin legs drawn up to her chest and her head bowed forward. I looked around frantically for Carrie.

My first order of business should have to be sure that Anne was okay, alive, but I was suddenly so sure that Nancy had the story wrong and it wasn’t Wayne who had been shot but perhaps Wayne who had done the shooting. I was afraid for Carrie. No, that doesn’t begin to describe it. I was panicked that I’d find her behind the house, her blond hair splayed across the grass like Anne’s, her eyes big and empty and gaping. I’m embarrassed to say it now. I lost my head. I’d been an officer of the law for ten years and I lost my mind that night. I was shouting her name and running around the house when I saw her standing deep in the yard, back where Wayne’s old Chevy sat rusting next to the shed. She didn’t respond; she just kept standing there unmoving.

When I reached her I tried to touch her, to say thank god you’re alive, but she yanked away and pointed into the open driver’s side door. Wayne was huddled against the passenger door, his chin resting on his chest. He was dressed in his work boots, old, dirty steel-toed Red Wing work boots, the kind they carry at the farm supply. He had on an ancient pair of stained painter’s pants and a button down, flannel-lined denim shirt. He had a carpenter’s pencil in his pocket and clipped to the waistband of his pants was a tape measure. It was eerie. Wayne hadn’t been a carpenter in easily ten or fifteen years. He’d been working in the home design showroom since I can remember. I opened my mouth to say just that—it was as though my brain were registering things backwards—and then I saw the rest: the pistol in his right hand and the mostly empty Wild Turkey bottle in his left. The glass behind his head glistened darkly.

I heard the sirens approaching and another car and then another pull into the driveway. In my panicked state the minutes had seemed to slow down and I felt like it’d been hours since I’d arrived but now I could let my pulse return to normal. Someone else was here, and I was relieved because I couldn’t think of anything to do.

“Is he dead, son?” I heard Sherriff Park calling across the yard. He was walking swiftly our way, training his Maglite on the ground.

“I believe so, sir.” I said.

“Is she alright?”

I looked at Carrie. She did not look back but nodded almost imperceptibly and said, “I’m fine.”

“Get her inside a car where it’s warm for God’s sake.”

I took her by the arm and led her across the field and away from the old pick up truck. The front yard was a carnival of blue and red lights, people were everywhere and radios were squawking. She stopped a moment, put her hand out as though to push me to arms length. She took a long shuddering breath, and let it out, a sob, in one stream. She caught it, her eyes closed as if she were talking herself into something. She met my eyes for the first time, nodded and we kept walking.

She walked into the bar of Mimmo’s Café still clad in that awful pinstripe suit she thought made her look thinner. She’d pulled her hair back into a ponytail, but wisps still stuck to her sweaty cheeks. I was glad she wore a jacket so we didn’t both have to ignore her pit stains.

“I went ahead and ordered us a carafe, thirsty Thursday and all.” I said by way of greeting. Anna smiled wryly and filled her glass with the house red. She sipped and then sipped again, the muscles in her jaw flexing as she swallowed. At twenty-five, she already looked like a pro.

“I need to ask you a favor and I need you to not ask any questions.”

“I’m happy to do you a favor but we both know I’m not promising no questions.” She sat a little longer and then lit a cigarette. She smoked the whole thing down and then nudged it out in the black plastic ashtray between us.

“Can I come stay with you for a while?” I sat back in my seat and pulled a cigarette from her pack while I studied her. She met my gaze, her steady eyes giving away nothing.

Anna got married two years ago to the man we all assumed was the love of her life. And frankly, we were jealous. When Anna got into that car wreck, when she pulled the muscles in her lower back or whatever, she was told to take a warm bath in Epsom salts. She went out to the CVS, found the salts, got herself some tea and muscle rub and when she finally made it home to draw her bath, she discovered that their apartment bathtub was missing a stopper. So what did David do? He jerry-rigged a cloth stopper and a plastic cup and sat there at her feet, holding the cup in place so she could recline in her Epsom salts. That’s the kind of guy David was.

The only question was why on Earth Anna needed to leave her two-bedroom bungalow tucked away at the end of the cul-de-sac and that was not the question to ask.

“When?”

“Tomorrow. Or Saturday. I can wait until Saturday if you want.”

“Anna, if you need to come tomorrow, you should come tomorrow. I’ll clean out the spare room.”

She stared straight ahead into the mirror behind the bottles. She dropped her chin to her chest for a moment, then pulled her hair out of the ponytail, removed her earrings and set them on the bar. She shrugged that awful gray suit coat off her shoulders. She was wearing this magenta silk sleeveless blouse. I could see the curve of her biceps and deltoids. This was new.

Poppy always requested Carla when her parents planned an evening out. It perplexed her mother because Carla wasn’t particularly entertaining. Other sitters came armed with activities that kept her occupied, but Poppy knew that if Carla came over, she’d happily let Poppy use her fountain pen while she watched television.

“Will you help me with my homework?”

“Sure, what is it?”

“I need to write a thank you letter. But I am not very good at spelling. Would you write it out? Just to help me with the words?”

Carla hesitated, as though she thought she might be aiding some cheating plot. Poppy could hear the opening notes of her favorite television show’s theme song. Carla shrugged, took out her pen and began to write while Poppy dictated.

Poppy watched as Carla’s thin, pale hand danced lightly across the page. The ink seemed to flow like the tiniest faucet, gracefully appearing on the paper. It glistened there for a moment before drying. The letters looked like art work.

When Carla was settled into Poppy’s father’s recliner, Poppy uncapped the fountain pen and began to duplicate the letter. She examined each character in Carla’s neat script and did her best to mimic it. The letters seemed to lift toward the top of the page, as though there were an imaginary string that pulled them northward. They canted slightly to the right, speeding toward the edge, and her G’s and Y’s looped effortlessly. Poppy spent the hours before her bed time writing the words over and over, trying to make her hand form the letters just like Carla’s did.

When Carla came into her room to turn out the light she stopped for a moment.

“Why do you try so hard to write like me?”

Poppy thought a moment. Carla’s long, straight blonde hair hung over one shoulder like a curtain. Poppy fingered her own coarse hair. When she was in first grade her mother explained that no matter what she did, her hair would never look like Carla’s or any of the other girls in school with straight, light colored locks. Poppy had resigned herself that her own reflection would never resemble girls like Carla.

“Your handwriting is pretty.”

“Huh. Thanks. Well, good night then.”

Poppy pulled the thank you notes, folded into dozens of tiny squares so it would fit into the palm of her hand, out from beneath her pillow. She could examine them in the square of blue light coming into the window from the street. It was close, but she could still tell the difference. Her A’s were too round and it was evident by the weight of her script that her writing was more deliberate than Carla’s.